Mukasey

Michael Collins
Fiction delivers justice that reality rarely approaches. Victims endure suffering and emerge as victors after overcoming incredible challenges. Stieg Larsson's gripping Millennium Trilogy weaves a story of revenge and triumphs for Lizbeth Salander, locked away in a mental institution and sexually abused for years. When Salander got out and threatened to go public about a high level sexual exploitation ring, the perpetrators sought to lock her up again. In the final installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Salander found some justice. (Image)

Susan Lindauer's autobiography, Extreme Prejudice, tells a story with certain broad similarities. In her case, however, the hornet's nest kicked back with a real vengeance. After over a decade as a U.S intelligence asset, Lindauer was privy to information about pre war Iraq that threatened to serve up a huge embarrassment to the Bush-Cheney regime. She hand delivered a letter to senior Bush administration officials in hopes of averting what she predicted would be the inevitably tragic 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Those officials, unnamed in the indictment, were her second cousin, then White House chief of staff Andy Card, and Colin Powell.

The story itself is so predictable it's hardly worth reading, but the comments are very satisfying. Realize too, this is the Wall Street Journal Law Blog . . . enjoy.

August 12, 2008, 1:09 pm[[http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/08/12/mukasey-not-every-wrong-or-every-violation-of-the-law-is-a-crime/
|Mukasey: ‘Not Every Wrong, Or . . . Every Violation of the Law, is a Crime’]]
Posted by Ashby Jones
Mukasey said today that neither Monica Goodling nor Kyle Sampson (nor anyone else, it seems), will face prosecution for considering improper political considerations in their hiring of judges and lawyers. (Click here and here for earlier posts on the topic.) “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said. “In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.”
etc.

Frank Rich is getting closer to the truth . . . I look forward to the day when he discovers and writes about the "war on terror" being a lie, a fraud, a hoax . . . and then REALLY connects the dots . . . And, Frank, the (9/11) crime is WORSE than the cover-up. --Betsy

WE know what a criminal White House looks like from “The Final Days,” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic account of Richard Nixon’s unraveling. The cauldron of lies, paranoia and illegal surveillance boiled over, until it was finally every man for himself as desperate courtiers scrambled to save their reputations and, in a few patriotic instances, their country.

A House committee has subpoenaed FBI transcripts of interviews with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regarding their possible roles in the exposure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued the subpoena on Monday to Attorney General Michael Mukasey in the latest chapter of a standoff over what Bush and Cheney told a special prosecutor about the case in 2004.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department denied Waxman’s request for a voluntary release of the interview transcripts on grounds that it “raises serious separation of powers and heightened confidentiality concerns.”

(04-14) 17:51 PDT Washington -- Attorney General Michael Mukasey's assertion that an unmonitored terrorist phone call before the Sept. 11 attacks showed the need for more government wiretapping authority drew a scathing retort Monday from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who accused him of rewriting history and ducking questions.

In a March 27 appearance before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Mukasey said the 2001 terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the government had been able to determine the destination of a call from a known safe house in Afghanistan to the United States.

Posted by Kurt Opsahl
Yesterday, Senator Leahy asked tough questions [Audio Excerpt MP3, 2.75MB] and this morning the San Francisco Chronicle continued its investigation of the mysterious phone call that Attorney General Mukasey referenced while speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco a few weeks ago. During the questions after his speech, Mukasey said that the government:

shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about ... We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went.